{"id":32200,"date":"2015-08-01T04:00:41","date_gmt":"2015-08-01T08:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32200"},"modified":"2015-07-31T21:19:31","modified_gmt":"2015-08-01T01:19:31","slug":"cathy-young-on-similarities-between-the-social-justice-movement-and-stalinism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/08\/01\/cathy-young-on-similarities-between-the-social-justice-movement-and-stalinism\/","title":{"rendered":"Cathy Young on similarities between the social justice movement and Stalinism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cathy Young<\/a> translated a passage from a Russian novel that shows rather well the similarities of modern-day social justice crusaders and WW2-era Soviet party discipline and practice:<\/p>\n

The other day, I was re-reading Pretender to the Throne<\/em>, the second book in the Ivan Chonkin trilogy by Vladimir Voinovich (the brilliant Russian writer I interviewed recently<\/a> for The Daily Beast<\/em>) and was particularly struck by one scene that I thought bore an uncanny resemblance to the online gang-ups on accused transgressors against political correctness that have become a common feature of the \u201csocial justice\u201d community. The tragicomic scene, which takes place in a provincial Soviet town in the fall of 1941, shows a meeting of the district Communist Party committee which holds hearings on several cases of alleged violations of the Party code of conduct. It\u2019s all here: the casual, innocuous remark interpreted as offensive; the demand for confession and repentance; the notion that maintaining one\u2019s innocence or trying to minimize the \u201coffense\u201d compounds guilt; the escalating, absurdly ballooning accusations in which everything the accused says or does is taken as further proof of guilt; the pressure on members of the community to join the mob to demonstrate their own allegiance to the One True Ideology; the lack of human sympathy elevated to a virtue; the notion that proper \u201chumanism\u201d is not manifested in compassion but in \u201crelentless war on all manifestations of hostile ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

I decided to translate and post this passage (for various reasons, I wasn\u2019t too happy with the version in the published English translation of the book) because I think it\u2019s a remarkable demonstration of the ideological continuity between the Soviet\/Stalinist version of the far left and today\u2019s \u201cprogressive\u201d Western version. Thankfully, minus the power to send people to the gulag.<\/p>\n

A few explanatory notes. The action takes place several months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. A secondary character in the novel, collective farm chairman Ivan Golubev, attends a local Communist Party meeting for a hearing on charge of violating Party discipline. Before his own case comes up, he gets to witness the \u201ctrial\u201d of another accused man, Shevchuk, a schoolteacher in his fifties. Presiding over the meeting is district Party chief Andrei Revkin.<\/p>\n

Other explanatory notes are included in the text in brackets where necessary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cathy Young translated a passage from a Russian novel that shows rather well the similarities of modern-day social justice crusaders and WW2-era Soviet party discipline and practice: The other day, I was re-reading Pretender to the Throne, the second book in the Ivan Chonkin trilogy by Vladimir Voinovich (the brilliant Russian writer I interviewed recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,7,28,53],"tags":[780,997,433],"class_list":["post-32200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media","category-politics","tag-communism","tag-socialjustice","tag-sovietunion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8nm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32201,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32200\/revisions\/32201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}